Dickens the Journalist: Models, Modes and Media

Abstract

‘He was a great novelist,’ G. K. Chesterton wrote in a brief introduction to Dickens’s Reprinted Pieces from Household Words, ‘but he was also … a good journalist, and a good man. It is often necessary for a good journalist to write bad literature. It is sometimes the first duty of a good man to write it/As usual, Chesterton flaunts his talent for Wildean paradox, omitting only to add ‘That is all’ after his climax. From the dualist perspective of aesthetically-demarcated high and popular cultures, it may have been possible to view good journalism and ‘bad literature’ as compatible judgements, but modern readers, accustomed to reading in the broader church of cultural studies, may want the matrix of quality, style,¹ and medium to be probed a little further. One way to consider the problem of Dickens’s style is to recall the career in journalism which the last eight chapters have endeavoured to trace, and consider the many different formats of journalism and journalistic discourse which such a career imposed: starting with the periphrasis and ‘unnecessary detail’ of penny-a-line items in the British Press, verbatim transcriptions of parliamentary speech in the Mirror of Parliament, selective reports of the debating along with puff verses in the True Sun, graduating to the descriptive ‘re-staging’ of election contests in the Morning Chronicle, editorial banter in Bentley’s Miscellany, theatre reviews in the Examiner, leader-writing in the Daily News and The Examiner, and so forth.